Thredded is a Rails 4.2+ (yes! - it’s ready for Rails 5) forum/messageboard engine. Its goal is to be as simple, feature rich, and approachable as possible.

By “simple” we mean that it is a quick and easy way to extend an existing rails app with an forum engine instead of spinning up a whole other app like discourse - no docker needed, no extra heroku dynos, no knowledge of ember needed. It is easily theme'able, configurable, well tested, and has a long history with its maintainers (15 years and many rewrites/evolutions).

Thredded got several releases since I last posted here. The highlights are:

A notifications plugin system, so you can notify about new posts e.g. on Slack.

Many improvements to Private Messages.

Spanish and Polish localisation.

Preview-as-you-type.

And finally, the feature I'm very excited about, a plugin that renders TeX math via KaTeX. The rendering happens server-side for maximum accessibility and performance. This is achieved by calling KaTeX (written in JavaScript) from Ruby via ExecJS.

Thredded again has received some major improvements since I last posted here.

Highlights:

Oneboxes: URLs to supported resources placed on their own line are replaced with a "onebox".Oneboxes replace the previous YouTube and Vimeo implementations and add support for dozens more sites, including Tweets, Google Maps, and so on. The implementation is powered by the onebox gem. #545